Rich Hope to Freeze Assets as Well as Heads

January 22, 2006

Hundreds of people, maybe more, currently plan to join Ted Williams’s head in frozen storage when they die, hoping that medical technology will advance to the point that they can be reanimated and revived. The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday about efforts by some of these people to remember themselves, or their future selves, in their wills.

David Pizer, for example, a resort operator in Arizona, has set up a trust that would manage his current $10 million in assets until he is thawed out. He suggests that he could be the "richest man in the world" were he to wake up in 100 years and collect all the interest that has compounded in the meantime. (Oh, and his wife too — he says he wants her to join him. That’s nice.)

He won’t be the richest, not if Ken Weiss can help it. Weiss, co-founder of RSA Security, is going to freeze himself too and he’s worth a lot more than Pizer. But even he will be living only in a modest apartment in Previously Dead Village if he is right that, as he claims, several (unnamed) "billionaires" are out there with similar plans.

Don Laughlin, who founded Laughlin’s Casino in Laughlin, Nevada, consulted with his lawyers recently to discuss the details of a "personal revival trust," as some are calling it. According to the article, Laughlin rejected the idea of leaving his money to a "mere biological clone," opting to gamble (get it?) on his own personal head being revived along with his own personal memories.

A lawsuit is currently pending in Broward County, Florida, over a large personal revival trust set up by Jakob P. Canaday, who died in 2004. Shockingly, his two daughters showed up on "the eve" of his death (is that the night before or the night after you die? might make a difference here) with a new will that leaves everything to them instead of daddy’s frozen self. Canaday’s brother says the decedent’s wishes should be honored, no matter how bizarre. The daughters say nothing, having declined to comment.

I’m more on board with being shot out of a cannon, like Hunter Thompson. Just seems more dignified than having your head frozen for hundreds of years, or until the first time the power goes out, anyway.